Every day I experience life in the world of healthcare IT, supporting 3000 doctors, 18000 faculty, and 3 million patients. In this blog I record my experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muse on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Cool Technology of the Week

How many times have you heard the complaint "the application is slow" but lack data about server, network, or desktop performance to facilitate diagnosis and resolution?

As we all rollout EHRs to small provider offices, often with challenging internet connections, remote monitoring of cloud network performance becomes even more critical.

AppNeta's PathView microAppliance provides an easy to deploy zero administration network monitoring tool. It's about the same size as a cell phone and can be placed at remote business locations, requiring only power and an ethernet connection.

You place one of their devices in the locationyou want to monitor network activity. When you plug it into the wall and an ethernet connection, it uploads network performance data to AppNeta cloud servers. You can also place two or more devices in separate locations, and monitor the traffic between those locations. For EHR cloud providers, it's simple to configure the device, send it via UPS to a provider practice with instructions to plug into the wall, and gather performance data without complicated onsite network sniffing setups and configuration.

Currently we have deployed these devices at our central EHR private cloud site and two of major remote practices The level of detail and depth of available metrics and reports is amazing.